Quotes About Self-discovery

I didn't feel like a big fat idiot anymore. And I didn't feel like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen. I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too.

A terrible thing happened to you, but you mustn't let it define your life.

And the fuck is yours too, WTF. That question does not apply 'to everything every day.' If it does, you're wasting your life. If it does, you're a lazy coward and you are not a lazy coward. Ask better questions, sweet pea. The fuck is your life. Answer it.

I know it's hard to write, darling. But it's harder not to. The only way you'll find out if you "have it in you" is to get to work and see if you do.

The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods. It took me four years, seven months, and three days to do it. I didn't know where I was going until I got there. It was a place called the Bridge of the Gods.

Transformation doesn't ask that you stop being you. It demands that you find a way back to the authenticity and strength that's already inside of you. You only have to bloom.

Transformation isn't a butterfly. It's the thing before you get to be a pretty bug flying away. It's huddling in the dark cocoon and then pushing your way out. It's the messy work of making sense of your fortunes and misfortunes, desires and doubts, hang-ups and sorrows, actions and accidents, mistakes and successes, so you can go on and become the person you must next become.

There are stories you'll learn if you're strong enough to travel there. One of them might cure you.

Every now and then I could see myself—truly see myself—and a sentence would come to me, thundering like a god into my head, and as I saw myself then in front of that tarnished mirror what came was the woman with the hole in her heart.

The thing about hiking the Pacific Coast Trial, the thing that was so profound to me that summer -- and yet also, like many things, so very simple -- was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do. How there was no escape or denial. (69)

But I wasn't out here to keep myself from having to say I am not afraid. I'd come, I realized, to stare that fear down, to stare everything down, really—all that I'd done to myself and all that had been done to me. I couldn't do that while tagging along with someone else.

I didn't know how living outdoors and sleeping on the ground in a tent each night and walking alone through the wilderness all day almost every day had come to feel like my normal life, but it had. It was the idea of not doing it that scared me.

I didn't feel sad or happy. I didn't feel proud or ashamed. I only felt that in spite of all the things I'd done wrong, in getting myself here, I'd done right.

I will never go home, I thought with a finality that made me catch my breath, and then I walked on, my mind emptying into nothing but the effort to push my body to the bald monotony of the hike. There wasn't a day on the trail when that monotony didn't ultimately win out, when the only thing to think about was whatever was the physically hardest. It was a sort of scorching cure.

I'd only wanted to be alone. Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.

Read it like a motherfucker.

I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild.

I always did what someone else wanted me to do. I've always been someone's daughter or mother or wife. I've never just been me.

My pack rose up like a mantle behind me, towering several inches above my head, and gripped me like a vice all the way down to my tailbone. It felt pretty awful, and yet perhaps this was how it felt to be a backpacker. I didn't know. I only knew that it was time to go, so I opened the door and stepped into the light.

The only way you'll find out if you "have it in you" is to get to work and see if you do. The only way to override your "limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude" is to produce. You have limitations. You are in some way inept. This is true of every writer, and it's especially true of writers who are twenty-six. You will feel insecure and jealous. How much power you give those feelings is entirely up to you.

Go because you want to go. Because wanting to leave is enough.

Of all the things I'd been skeptical about, I didn't feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.

I think of quotes as mini–instruction manuals for the soul. It

you are so goddamned young. Which means about eight of the ten things you have decided about yourself will over time prove to be false. The other two things will prove to be so true that you'll look back in twenty years and howl.